Bill strikes a nerve

Finance Minister Bill English touched a raw nerve when he spoke of a cohort of individuals who are “pretty damned hopeless.” He was pilloried by the Opposition, and other commentators were quick to condemn the Govt for its failure to lift these unemployed out of their hopelessness. It’s an issue which divides NZ. Evidence came in the flood of emails to English’s office supporting what he said, more in a day than he had received all year.

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Comments (28)

Rich Prick

Criminals and now the willfully indolent. Is there no group despised by the public Labour won’t cuddle up to? Surely they must realise this loses them support. Let’s have a sweepstake, I’m picking 25% as rock bottom for them.

Mobile Michael

I thought it was brave of English to publicly make his comments about needing to ensure the “pretty damned hopeless” were encouraged to have the right behaviours when it came to work preparedness and to make it a policy aim to improve the situation. That Labour and the Greens thought the problem only existed in the minds of National MPs said more about them and their worldview where persistent poverty is never an individual’s fault.

David Garrett

Boris Piscina

Singapore doesn’t have a problem with such types. But then Singapore has National Military Service rather than welfare. They cost about the same. One produces results and is of benefit to the country. The other one doesn’t and is just a benefit.

UpandComer

The issue isn’t that he said a cohort are ‘hopeless’ full stop. He said “and the dairy industry has rightly said that a lot of of kiwis turning up are pretty damned hopeless…and if we don’t work together to get them working then they’ll be with us a long time”.

So he repeated a statement of fact, then said he’d continue to help change that fact.

Labour actually don’t give a shit about these people beyond their ability to vote for Labour. That’s very clear from listening to Annette King and Grant Robertson saying that Bill was an ’embarrassment’ in the house during question time for saying that it’s not good enough kiwis don’t turn up twice, can’t fill out the form or pass a drugs test. That’s also clear from reading Jane Bowron’s execrable piece of swill and patronising virtue signalling in the Dominion.

Labour didn’t have a fricken clue who these people are; where they live, what agencies they interact with, how much they cost, if the billions spent buying their vote did anything else. No fricken idea. The only reason we have an idea now, is because Bill English has devised policy mechanisms to get the data to help people individually. For Labour ‘caring’ about people they never interact with or do anything for is the thing.

Labour’s reaction on this exemplifies why they must never be in government, and why they’re so bad now for unskilled people they claim to ‘care’ so deeply about.

Labour refuse to grant people the most basic human respect and dignity of treating them as adults and having some expectations about how they behave. Expectations that a grown man can turn up 3 times in a row, pass a bloody drugs test, fill out the form, and follow instructions. Nope, in Labour if you have those expectations you’re an ’embarrassment’ or you must be some kind of feudal land-lord looking down your nose at people. As long as they vote labour, who cares about telling them the truth and then developing some character. Let them smoke weed is Labour’s version of let them eat cake.

These people are only meat for Labour’s political machine. Labour doesn’t give a shit about them, that’s obvious, that’s the real reason aside from being generally incompetent, lazy and mendacious they’re stuck in purgatory. Long may it continue.

Huevon

No, English’s statement didn’t strike a nerve. How could it? It was true. The only people who don’t see it that way are ones who have spent their lives in student union politcs and the Labour party caucus room.

s.russell

I feel for these poor hopeless c*nts. Being told they’re hopeless by a career politician who oversaw the degradation of the apprentice schemes in the ’80’s and 90’s. (Mostly the ’90’s)
English doesn’t exactly offer any insight as to what what might incentivise these poor loser c*nts to preform above and beyond. Mind you he exhibited a similar lack of vision as leader of the opposition before he got shitcanned both for lack of vision and charisma.

radvad

The left, especially that Bowron shiela, have claimed this is proof that the education sector is failing under National. If they engaged their brain for one second they would realise that the time these deadbeats should have been learning to read and write was when Labour was in power.

Adolf Fiinkensein

Adolf Fiinkensein

You have to have some sympathy for the poor bastards on the left. They are being gazzumped on all sides.

Consider the mathematics of social welfare.

1 National has substantially decreased the number of people on welfare by getting them back into work.

2 National has substantially increased (for the first time in forty years?) the amount paid to the remaining beneficiaries. Note Clark and Cullen failed to do this when they were rolling in vast annual surpluses.

3 Ask yourself whether the combination of 1 and 2 has led to SUBSTANTIALLY LESS annual expenditure on social welfare? If it has it is of great benefit to ALL NZers.

Peter

He told the obvious truth, and many NZers know the truth.

The bleating is because some people don’t like facing with the truth if the truth is not politically acceptable. So they attack the messenger. Obviously, this doesn’t endear them to people who seek truth.

Black with a Vengeance

Paul Marsden

What does one expect with the entire dumbing down of the education system; lack of male role models in schools and in young children’s lives; technological developments that bring instant pornography to the eyes of anyone in possession with a mobile phone; the breakdown of the family unit as a result of legalisation legalising homosexuality and prostitution; a welfare system the likes of which exists no where else in the world; diminishing work ethics; the populace demanding a public holiday for anyone and everyone that farts etc etc. The list goes on and on. New Zealand needs to look at itself in the mirror.

When I arrived in NZ in 1966 there was less than 1% unemployment. There was some featherbedding in government jobs. You would see one guy working and two leaning on shovels. A lot of these people were made redundant and put on the dole. This seemed to make economic sense. The cost of the dole was less than low paid central or local government jobs. However, when everything was taken into account like inter generational welfare and crime it may not have saved money in the long term.

deadrightkev

National may well be Labour Lite but they are not the pack of dope smoking anti science retards that want to slaughter the dairy herd and force use to take the train to work.”

Labour lite? Ha. You have no clue do you and you call me a fuckwit?

You are so sucked in by the sycophancy of John Key and the National puppet squad you cannot see how far left your great old party has gone in the last few elections. National doesn’t represent you anymore. National doesn’t stand for anything.

John Key stands alongside Obama and the other UN progressive wankers for fucks sake.

National represents what you all despised about Labour in years gone by. You just don’t have the gonads to admit it. National will align itself with the Greens in a heartbeat to stay in power.

Do you seriously know anything about politics?NATIONAL INTRODUCED AN ETS YOU DICKHEAD

The New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme (NZ ETS) is a partial-coverage all-free allocation uncapped highly internationally linked emissions trading scheme. The NZ ETS was first legislated in the Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading) Amendment Act 2008 in September 2008 under the Fifth Labour Government of New Zealand

ROFL
Dumb
Like some conservative politician who writes a gooey love poem to an employee who is not his wife?
Or the gibbering whacks that voted for said conservative ?
hmmmm
Sack of hammers would be smarter than both put together .
You dont have a single clue dead. .

Oh by the way 175 country’s just signed the Paris agreement you ain’t seen nothing yet .